Using a Cloud Services Provider to Get IT Infrastructure that Grows

For many businesses, growth can be difficult. There are a lot of things that come with growth beyond simply expanding one’s market share and reach.

Growth means taking on new responsibilities and adding new capabilities to support and sustain that growth.

One all-too-frequently overlooked aspect of growth planning for small to midsize businesses is the IT infrastructure for that business.

This is an easy trap to fall into, since so many small businesses have modest IT infrastructure needs—making them easy to forget about.

An IT Infrastructure That Grows With Your Business

But, as a business grows, the need for computing power, security, and monitoring can increase exponentially. To keep up with ever-growing needs for IT infrastructure, business owners need an IT solution that can grow with their business.

There are two ways to try and accomplish this:

Overbuild an In-House IT Infrastructure. It is possible to create room for growth by overbuilding your on-premises infrastructure to meet projected future needs. However, this method has a few key shortcomings:

It’s expensive

It requires accurate projections of how much infrastructure you’ll need months in advance

Responses to change in computing demands will be slow

Use a Cloud Hosting Provider for Infrastructure. Rather than trying to forecast your IT infrastructure needs months in advance in a volatile market, you can simply acquire IT infrastructure from a hosted cloud services provider.

Why Use a Cloud-Based Infrastructure?

There are several reasons to use a cloud-based IT infrastructure over an in-house solution, especially for growing businesses:

Flexibility for Growth. The trouble with using on-premises infrastructure is that it can be very difficult to add onto at a later date. To expand your capabilities, you have to add more hardware. With a cloud solution, the cloud provider simply has to make a slight adjustment to the amount of resources available to you through the hypervisor virtual machine.

Speed of Deployment. Installing new hardware takes time because you have to integrate new hardware with your existing infrastructure and troubleshoot it. Cloud service providers can handle these issues near-seamlessly behind the scenes in minutes—they already have the hardware up and running, they just need to allocate the resources.

Reduced Costs. With an in-house IT infrastructure, you’ll have to get new hardware installed and ready to go well in advance of when your needs actually grow. This means paying for the hardware up front, and then paying for the maintenance on all that hardware in the intervening months when you’re not actually using it. With a cloud-based service, you only have to pay for the infrastructure you’ll actually be using from month-to-month, reducing overall costs.

All told, using the cloud for your IT infrastructure needs can make managing said needs easier. With a cloud-based solution, you can add or remove computing resources as necessary to match your month-to-month demand.

This scalability in cloud computing can be a huge advantage for businesses that are looking to reduce costs in the now while leaving room for future growth.

Learn more about the power of cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and how you can use it to support the growth of your business today!